 Dylan Schumacher, said it out of the fence. And today, I want to talk about kind of the journey of a pistol shooter. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think it's worth discussing. I was thinking about my own personal growth and development as a shooter, and I was thinking about, if someone is starting from ground zero, right, they're just starting from ground zero, and they want to go all the way to IDPA, Grand Champion, Grand Master, whatever, right? Just hypothetically, okay? What are the steps or the things they should major on and work on as they move up the shooting proficiency ladder, right? And so this is, I think, probably not a lot of people agree with me, so I'm curious to hear if you have feedback, but here's what I'm thinking. First thing you need to do is you need to learn the basics, right, because all shooting is the basics. That's all it is. So you need to know how to draw your gun. You need to know how to side trigger press, side alignment, side picture. You need to know how to basically load your gun, right, and overhand rack, and you need to know how to clear malfunctions, and all the basics of manipulating and shooting a pistol, right? Pistol handling, how I hold it, how I shoot it, where I point when I'm not shooting it, holstering, unholstering, malfunctions reloading, et cetera. And marksmanship, being able to put the sights on target and hit what I want to hit when I want to hit it, right? Two camps of shooting. So you need to know all that. You need to know the basics. You need to know how to do that. Then, after you have that down to some degree, it doesn't even necessarily need to be automatic yet, but as you work, because that takes time, as you're working towards making all those things automatic, so gun's empty, boom, it gets reloaded. You don't think about it, it just happens, right? The next thing that I think you need to work on is speed. I think you need to be able to do that quickly. And I'm talking about five, seven yards and in, and being able to do that at speed, at a reasonable speed. And what I mean is be able to do a concealed draw in two seconds or under, preferably around one five, right? You need to be able to do that quickly. And the reason is, here's my thought process behind that. I'm working from the most likely self-defense encounter you'll have, to the least likely self-defense encounter you'll ever have. Most likely, your defensive encounter will be from zero to seven yards, three shots, three yards, three seconds. We've all heard that, which by the way, that's questionable about how good that is because that got pulled from police shooting statistics and not necessarily civilian shooting statistics, so that's questionable. But the point is, I still think it's gonna be close, right, because if someone's gonna rob you, or whatever, they're gonna need to get close to you in order to do that. So, it's gonna be a closer encounter. And the thing that you're gonna be able to need to do is get your gun out quickly, quickly because you have less distance, which means less time, in order to access that weapon and get it on target. And then you're gonna need to fire quickly because again, less distance, less time. And if someone wants to intentionally close that distance with you, you might not have time to get very many shots off before they're on top of you, a determined attacker, right? So, given that, I think that the first thing you need to get good at is getting the gun out quickly and getting shots on target quickly. And when I say on target, I'm talking like B or C zone here, okay? Like anything below the collarbone and above the waist and between the shoulders. Like, I'm not talking like A zone hits. Is that what we want? Yes, okay, we want a tight group right here, right? We want those A zone hits. Sure, absolutely. But, again, we're growing in our skill set here. And I'd rather you quickly be able to get the combat effective hits. Because if you shoot a guy here and here and then the belly button and over here, is that combat effective? Yeah, I mean, is that gonna have some effect on the guy? Yes, I would not wanna get shot in any of those places, right? And that might be enough to save your life. Do we want them all right here? Sure, yeah. But we'll take we can get, right? So again, as you're growing in the journey, right? The goal is to hit them all right here, but again, we're growing. So that's the first thing I think you should work on is being able to get that gun out quickly, five to seven yards, get some hits in the C zone here and be able to do that at speed, right? So, you know, again, first shot, two seconds, one five, being able to get maybe four or five shots out, you know, get a build drill, like three, four seconds, something like that, something reasonable, achievable, but being able to get shots on target quickly. So from there, I think you should be able to get the, just then you're gonna start to tighten those groups up, right? Then we're gonna call for that high thoracic hit, just that eight inch circle or those A zone hits or whatever, you know? We're just gonna go for the craniocular bolt. Then we're gonna start to tighten those groups up, right? Be able to do a Mozambique and get two to the A and one to the A zone, like, then we wanna start to have those more precise. And again, so we went from speed, now we're taking that speed and we're making those precise hits at speed. Again, still at that five to seven distance mark, most likely, the least likely, remember. From there, we're gonna open our distance up. We're gonna go to that 10 to 50 yards, right? 50 yards is kind of my maximum pistol distance, right? The good pistol shooter should be able to hit what they want at 50 yards. Beyond that, we get questionable and we get into Superman territory. You can take a pistol beyond 50 yards, okay? It's just usually not done and your hits are gonna be much less effective, velocity's gonna die down, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Point is, kind of 10 to 50, right? Then we wanna start to back those shots up. So we learned how to go fast, learned how to go fast and precise at short range distance, seven and under. Now we wanna start to push it back. Wanna start to go to that 10 and that 15 and that 20 and that 25 and that 50 and be able to effectively get our pistol hits at distance. We're not at speed at distance, just at distance. Can you, hitting an eight inch circle with a string of five to 10 rounds at 10 yards, it gets harder than you thought, right? Especially when you get 10 rounds, like that recoil starts to wear on you. So after you're able to do that and after you're able to start to get those shots at distance, now you wanna be able to get those shots at distance in time, right? So the way I picture it is, speed in the beginning, precision and distance in the middle, speed at the end, right? So that's what we're doing. Those are our building blocks. Speed up close, precision up close and then distance and then being able to do the longer range stuff at speed, right? So I think you should be able to get a shot on an eight inch steel plate or eight inch circle on a paper at 25 yards in two seconds or less. I think you should be able to do that repeatably, right? You need to be able to hone those skills. So when you can do that at distance, now you're starting to get somewhere. Now you're starting to be a really proficient and elite gunfighter, pistol champion, pick your word. You're starting to get good and that's what I want for you. And to get there, right, all you're doing is you're building on those basics that you learned at the beginning, you're learning to do them quickly, you're learning to do them precisely and you're learning to do them quickly while doing them precisely, right? Like that's what we're building there. And so that's how I think the journey should go because again, most likely to least likely, most likely it's up close and you gotta get those shots out. Least likely you gotta take a shot at 35 yards and you need to, you gotta small margin of error, right? Like I just did not like it. I haven't heard of any civilian defensive shooting at taking place at 35 yards or 25 yards or 15 yards. What's the longest distance in your house? Okay, if you can hit inside that at speed at distance, that's a really good place to start, okay? Cause out in the real world, if you got 10 or 15 yards between you and a bad guy, you're gonna have a lot of their options other than shooting them. Now hey, you might have to, again, so we need a proficiency, right? But is that likely? And I just don't think it is. So that's kind of my thought on how to grow in your pistol journey. I would be curious what your thoughts are on that because I think I'm going against what a lot of people would say because I think a lot of us tend, especially if you're just a plinker, right? If you're just a casual shooter, you come out and you just wanna be able to hit stuff and you put the target out there far, you just take your time and try to hit it, which is fine as a hobby, but in the defensive shooting, practical defensive shooting world, I just don't know how much value that is if it's not under a time. A big fan of the shot clock, right? Shot clock doesn't lie. Some a big, big fan of that. Then after you do that stuff, then you can start working on your subpar, sub-second draws and all the fun, fancy stuff, right? I can do a sub-second draw. It's fun. Not entirely sure how much practical value that has at this point yet. No, just not sure yet. So, do brave deeds. Learn how to shoot your gun. Come see me if you're confused about that. And endure.